The Carnegie Endowment, which has some great Egypt experts, has put together a spiffy and extensive website on elections in Egypt, complete with nifty Flash charts of parliamentary representation. This takes us one step closer to my dream of finding the Egyptian equivalent to fivethirtyeight.com so I can know the exact vote count in Sohag's eastern districts.

I have it in mind to replicate the format of Carnegie's website, complete with profiles of key players, but in a much more satirical (or merely blunt and truthful) tone. The entry for Safwat al-Sherif would alone make it worth it.

Issandr El Amrani is a Cairo-based writer and consultant. His reporting and commentary on the Middle East and North Africa has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time and other publications. He also publishes one of the longest-running blog in the region, www.arabist.net.